Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts

Few authors have had such an influence on my (reading) life as Margaret Atwood. I first encountered her through The Handmaid's Tale for A-level in 1992, and subsequently read all her fiction, including most memorably the MaddAddam trilogy. I would happily reread and recommend this to anyone. Having finished Book of Lives, there is a strong temptation to revisit all of Atwood's œuvre, her non-fiction included. Just as The Handmaid's Tale is remarkable for its prescience (among other things), so is her work Payback, arguably foreshadowing the credit crisis. Atwood often describes her work as "speculative", and so to read her Other Worlds book on utopias and dystopias is also essential. To read Book of Lives is an undertaking at 560 pages of hardback, but ultimately very rewarding. Atwood says in her introduction that every author recognises the truth of Jekyll and Hyde: there is the persona of the writer (the public/private figure), and also the individual with their own life (private/public). Both overlap and are interchangeable. Equally, Atwood recognises that all fiction is part autobiography and vice versa. Over the course of the work it becomes evident not only how Atwood was strongly shaped by her parents and natural environment, but also how she, in turn, helped shape the concept of Canadian literature. Everything is iterative, even if it has antecedents, is a clear Atwoodian message. I obviously liked Atwood before reading Book of Lives. Now, knowing more about her, I like her even more: she is wry, mischievous (more Hermes than Apollo), and deeply intelligent. Like most, she despairs of Trump. Her concluding words are both wonderful and apt: "We scribes and scribblers are time travellers. Via the magic page we throw our voices not only from here to elsewhere, but also from now to a possible future. I'll see you there."

By Margaret Atwood